There was not much time.Yesterday when he first went up on deck his foot slipped and he caught himselfand then he saw the entire boat was covered with ice.

Phædrus wondered wherehe had seen Lila before, but he didn’t know. It seemed as though he had seenher, though. It was autumn then too, he thought, November, and it was verycold. He remembered the streetcar was almost empty except for him and themotorman and the conductor and Lila and her girlfriend sitting back three seatsbehind him. The seats were yellow woven rattan, hard and tough, designed foryears of wear, and then a few years later the buses replaced them and thetracks and overhead cables and the streetcars were all gone.

He remembered he had seenthree movies in a row and smoked too many cigarettes and had a bad headache andit was still about half an hour of pounding along the tracks before thestreetcar would let him off and then he would have a block and a half throughthe dark to get home where there would be some aspirin and it would be about anhour and a half after that before the headache would go away. Then he heardthese two girls giggle very loudly and he turned to see what it was. Theystopped very suddenly and they looked at him in such a way that there couldhave been only one thing they were giggling at. It was him. He had a big noseand poor posture and wasn’t anything to look at, and tended to relate poorly toother people. The one on the left who looked like she had been giggling theloudest was Lila. The same face, exactly — gold hair and smooth complexion andblue eyes — with a smothered smile she probably thought covered up what she waslaughing at. They got off a couple of blocks later, still talking and laughing.